Artificial Intelligence in Project Management

In our consulting work with clients across the globe, we’ve been asked umpteen number of times about the best practices in Project Management. At every level of the management hierarchy, individuals want to know the key practices for project success. What’s the best Project management mantra? The sure shot winning formula.

While a whole a lot can be said about effective project management practices and techniques, the one crucial aspect according to us is the project management tool in question. The fundamental question really is whether the project management tool is supporting the new age project manager.

The Times They Are A-Changin’

Remember one of the finest songs of Bob Dylan, The Times they are A-Changin’. Well, it perfectly fits today’s project management scenario.

The Times They Are A-Changin’

The market today is absolutely volatile with innovation happening every second. Organizations are trying to deliver advanced futuristic projects. However, they are using the same old traditional project management tools. And here lies the fundamental paradox, one that we feel is impacting and hurting many organizations and that seems worthy of attention. The tools that project managers are using in a bid to drive growth, are fundamentally impeding their ability to grow.

To sustain growth, deliver results and outdo competition project managers need tools that give them the power for quicker adaptations, sound decision-making and rapid delivery at low operational costs. And here’s where the new age Artificial Intelligence (AI) based Project management tool fits the bill.

Agile Project Management

The incremental development model and shorter release cycles of Agile helps in effective management and change. Shorter release cycle makes the system flexible, easy to change and less prone to errors. It also makes it easier to include any new changes, without majorly affecting the cost or timelines of the project. Moreover, all stakeholders of the project too, are involved in all iterations of the development. This inclusion at every step helps a great deal in maintaining transparency and visibility within the teams. A good project management tool helps you deliver the Agile Product.

Development principles. It focuses on the early delivery of business value, continuous improvement of the project’s product and processes, scope flexibility, team input, and delivering well-tested products that reflect customer needs.

In short, an Agile Project management tool lets you actually be agile. It upholds all agile processes and practices ensuring that your development is as per the Agile manifesto.

A project manager has to make many decisions around many complex variables throughout the life of a project. To make this task simpler Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning come to his rescue in AI backed Project Management Systems. Machine learning learns about a company, its systems, processes, and employees over the years, across different projects. It is, therefore, able to evaluate and provide the description of any decision from several views. Thus delivering a qualitatively new, more sophisticated understanding of an object being studied in comparison with any of unilateral description.

To cite an example of how machine learning can help, let us take a practical scenario. Usually, in the planning stage, associates tend to over-commit. There is a huge gap in the timelines of projected vis-a-vis actual. This can cause huge cost repercussions and jeopardize project schedules, budgets, and even customer relationships.

In such a scenario AI backed reports come to the rescue.

Project Management Tools that use Artificial intelligence learn over the years about different employees, their ability to do a task in a given time, their success and performance ratio.

This information further helps, schedule new projects with fairly realistic baselines. Team-planning, scheduling, and appraisals become more authentic with this information analyzed by the project management tool.

Business dashboards are the window of business intelligence. Displaying data and analysis is an important part of the data science process.

It is imperative that today’s project management tools bring the capabilities of machine learning, data science and AI to accessible dashboards that everyone can understand.

Using intelligent and intuitive dashboards project managers can gather together the data, understand the important considerations and provide the right answers while planning, executing and delivering a project. Moreover, dashboards can also streamline activities and reduce inefficiencies.

Basically, effective dashboards can help take the blinders off from a manager giving deep insights into the actual problems and pain areas.

Well, above are some of the key requirements that are supported by AI backed management tools. There is lot more to these tools, which are a must for the new age project manager, to survive in today’s era of speed and innovation.